94 notes from theories and documents of contemporary art

“demonstrating a freedom in a world in which freedom connotes a political attitude.” Alfred H. Barr

#1: art depends on a freedom more complex than the one referred to in political freedom. What is this freedom? How do we elucidate our limited definition?

“When you first saw a Cubist or Impressionistic picture there was this whole way of instructing the eyes on the subconscious. Dabs of color had to stand for real things; it was an abstraction of a guitar or hillside. The opposite is going on now. If you have bands of blue, green and pink, the mind doesn’t think sky, grass and flesh. These are colors and the question is what are they doing with themselves and each other…if one wants just that pure thing these associations get in the way.” Helen Frankenthaler

“One evening, passing a lighted window of a house, I was fascinated by red, blue and black shapes inside a room. But when I went up and looked in, I saw a red couch, a blue drape and a black table. The shapes had disappeared. I had to retreat to see them again. Making art has first of all to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all meaning of the thing seen. Then only could real meaning of it be understood and felt.” Ellsworth Kelly

#2: words have various lives, one of which is its existence outside, or prior to, associations. Does this exist? Can something exist outside of its associations?

“What helps me is to realize my own disabilities and expose them.” Louise Bourgeois

#3: An art of rigorous, example-setting honesty

Bertrand Russell’s response to an animal protection society solicitation: “Entirely in agreement with you. But I am so involved in my campaign for the prohibition of atomic weapons that I cannot concern myself with anything else. And since a nuclear war would probably kill all animals, it seems to me that I am already fighting for your cause.”

#4: Art is similarly engaged: We work to make objectification, power-spurned across generalizations impossible. A delay.

“Why do we have all these ugly things which nobody needs? Industrial manufacture and new materials have led to truly unlimited possibilities of forms. We simply manufacture everything that is technically possible and lack new structures on which to base our decisions.” Anselm Kiefer

#5: the meaningless created by a proliferation of forms. How does this happen and is it necessarily so? How else does one usher in forms to make new decisions? Can’t events and act and other arts do this?

“For though these evocations might seem only the phantasmagorical figments of the artist’s inward vision they are, notwithstanding, the projections of latent forces; forces that may be active or inert, in part revealed, inchoate or still unfathomed, which we are unconsciously at grips with every day of our lives; in fact, that music of the sphere which underlies each man-made system and every law of nature it is within our power to discern.” Max Bill

#6: I include this quote because I am apt to forget a lot of the motivation behind geometric, mathematic or abstract art. Just as Pollock and Newman were interested in identifying primitive processes, myths and impulses, these characters, such as Max Bill, were interested in identifying the mathematic expectations and structures of vision (and expectations). I hate his art. It makes me cringe. But it must be identified as a compassionate project as well.


“Abstractions and references must be totally avoided. In our freedom of invention we must succeed in constructing a world that can be measured only in its own terms.” Piero Manzoni

#7: Constructing both a world for the art work and the tools to evaluate it. This is key: A world that makes only its own sense so, hopefully, the reader will understand that our system has within it its own means of evaluation.

“Tradition shows the artist what not to do.” Ad Reinhardt

#8: An absolutist expression of a common sentiment among many young visual artists. Break tradition to contribute something new to the dialogue. And your experiences are completely new, so why not concoct a new form as well?

“I think we realized that you didn’t have to assert yourself as a personality in order to be personally expressive. We felt that we could deal solely with esthetic issues, with the meaning of abstraction, without sacrificing individuality—or quality.” Kenneth Noland

#9: This stands as interesting in the context of my Ashbery reading. Is analysis and inquiry personal? We certainly think so when lodging a critique against those who claim objectivity. But does this inquiry into abstraction feel rewarding as much as something he would probably identify as indulgent?

“There’s something about color that is so abstract that it is difficult for it to function in conjunction with solid form.” Kenneth Noland, in response to why he doesn’t paint sculpture.

#10: The nature of color. Adapt this to poetry. Figure out how elements work, their effects. This, I think, it more valuable info than conceptualizations about self. Why do people always ask about the latter? I am much more interested in what Pollock thinks of the color black—how it works on the canvas, etc.

“The language artists use has to be the language of the subject: that is not the language of everyday life. The language we use in sculpture is the language of sculpture: that has to do with materials, shapes, intervals and so on. I am a sculptor: I try to form meaning out of bits of steel.” Anthony Caro

#11: For poetry, what is the language of poetry, as distinct from the language of communication. We know what words would be used to describe and inquire into this form –communication, signifier, message, etc—but is that the language of poetry? If not, what is it?

“People have asked me, ‘What does your sculpture mean?’ It is an expression of my feeling. The meaning in art is implicit, not explicit; and to require explanations suggests a real discomfort with the visual. I wish people would trust their feelings more when making or looking at art.” Anthony Caro

#12: So, poetry read as implicit meaning rather than explicit. What value, then, is an explicit interpretation of a poem. Or, what does a New Critical reading of the work offer us? Should the poem stand on its own feeling or implicit meaning? Are we trying to root this practice of meaning-making into society?

“They are juxtaposed for various and changing visual effects. They are to challenge or echo each other, to support or oppose one another. The contacts, respectively boundaries, between them may vary from soft to hard touches, may mean pull and push besides clashes, but also embracing, intersecting, penetrating…

Such action, reaction, interaction –or interdependence—is sought in order to make obvious how colors influence and change each other: that the same color, for instance –with different groups or neighbors—looks different.” Josef Albers, The Color in My Paintings

#13: Beautiful social metaphor. He plays with how colors can relate, interact and change their inherency by what they are around.

“The changes in my recent work are developments of my earlier work. Those were concerned with the principles of repose and disturbance. In each of them a particular situation was stated visually. Certain elements within that situation remained constant. Others precipitated the destruction of themselves by themselves. Recurrently, as a result of the cyclic movement of repose, disturbance, and repose, the original situation was restated. This led me to a deeper involvement with the structure of contradiction and paradox in my more recent work. These relationships in visual terms concern such things as fast and slow movements, warm and cold color, focal and open space, repetition opposed to “event,” repetition as “event.” increase and decrease, static and active, black as opposed to white, greys as sequences harmonizing these polarities. My direction is continually conditioned by my responses to the particular work in progress at any moment. I am articulating the potentialities latent in the premise I have selected to work from. I believe that a work of art is essential distinguished by the transformation of the elements involved. Bridget Riley, Untitled Statement 1968

#14: A lot here. First, it makes me think of Chris’s Against Metaphor. Second, I like the fact that she starts with a premise and goes down, exploring the foundation of what she has locked in on exploring. Third, she learns all about methods while doing it. Fourth, the elements become transformed (in front of her, how?) as she works with them. How is writing repose? How is it disturbance?

“All that art is built on systems built beforehand, a priori systems; they express a certain type of thinking and logic that is pretty much discredited now as a way of finding out what the world’s like.” Donald Judd

#15: Ok, who is doing the discrediting. Some authoritative science? How about those narratives being constructed and empirical like those of any novelist? What’s interesting though is the degree to which these ideas foreshadow those of conceptual art and Kosuth. The move to get away from past forms. Judd definitely wanted to take art off of the wall, liberate it from the frame.

Could you be specific about how your own work reflects an anti-rationalistic point of view?
The parts are unrelational.
If there’s nothing to relate, then you can’t be rational about it because it’s just there?
Yes.
Then it’s almost an abdication of logical thinking.
I don’t have anything against using some sort of logic. That’s simple. But when you start relating parts, in the first place, you’re assuming you have a vague whole—the rectangle of the canvas—and definite parts, which is all screwed up, because you should have a definite whole and maybe no parts, or very few. The parts are always more important than the whole.
And you want the whole to be more important than the parts?
Yes. The whole’s it. The big program is to maintain the sense of the whole thing.

--Donald Judd

#16: How is it possible to get the whole and not the parts? Doesn’t the mind want to create a connection between whatever is present? (Rauschenberg) Oldenburg has been somewhat successful, however. His environmental sculptures hit at a large, concept level, even though they are made of parts. How is this possible in a poem, which consists of parts?

Furthermore, what would a poem look like if it tried to be a hologram? If it tried to convey the whole within each and every part?

“My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object.” Frank Stella

#17: The move toward seeing art as less a matter of associations and, instead, simple physical objects. This highlights the delightful confusion that most folks experience with contemporary art. Sometimes the objects seem to claim lofty aims, such as being expressions of laws of sight. While at other times, they claim to be merely what they are. As Ken has said, we, as artists, are supplying people with thought patterns with which they can make sense of the world. Hence, there is no contradiction to creating a multiplicity of forms.

“A painting is nearly an entity, one thing, and not the indefinable sum of the group of entities and references. The one thing overpowers the earlier painting. It also establishes the rectangle as a definite form: it is no longer a fairly neutral limit.” Donald Judd

#18: How do you create a poem in which the fact of its being “a poem” doesn’t overrule the contents? Or, rather, how do you redefine what poems do?

“The more parts a thing has, the more important order becomes, and finally order becomes more important than anything else.” Donald Judd

#19: Consider Rauschenberg. His paintings consist almost entirely of elements and he challenges the viewer to put them together. Indeed, order/interpretation are called for. Is Judd trying to bypass that process and convey an entire idea?

“This zero/neutral degree of form is ‘binding’ in the sense that the total absence of conflict eliminates all concealment (all mythification or secrecy) and consequently brings silence.”

#20: to achieve a statis in seeing, a quietude of the contentless. Something that matches the conceptual and minimally uses/taxes the eye.

“Art is the form that it takes. The form must unceasingly renew itself to insure the development of what we call new art. A change of form has so often led us to speak of a new art that one might think that inner meaning and form were/are linked together in the mind of the majority—artists and critics. Now, if we start from the assumption that new, ie “other,” art is in fact never more than the same thing in a new guise, the heart of the problem is exposed. To abandon the search for a new form at any price means trying to abandon the history of art as we know it: It means passing from the Mythical to the Historical, from the Illusion to the Real.” Daniel Buren

#21: Where’s his value judgment? I assume he is moving us toward a Marxist art practice. Which one is it, new ideas in new forms or old ideas in the guise of new clothes? X-apply Kosuth’s concern that people assume new materials mean new ideas, which it clearly doesn’t.

“What is being attempted, as we already understand, is the elimination of the imprint of form, together with the disappearance of form (of all forms). This involves the disappearance of ‘signature,’ of style, of recollection/derivation. A unique work (in the original sense), by virtue of its character, will be conserved. The imprint exists in a way, which is evident/insistent at the moment when it is, like form itself, a response to the problem or the demonstration of a subject or the representation of an attitude.” Daniel Buren

#22: Here again we see the defense of meta-art. It is personal, he argues, in the sense that it comes at a particular time and has ‘character.’ What are we identifying as important for an artist to ‘put into the art’? What gives it the sense of personal? Are figurative issues –banal, quotidian—likewise satisfied outside of art, making most art appear to be journal entries?

“Once the dwindling form/imprint/gesture has been rendered impotent/invisible, the proposition has/will have some chance to become dazzling.”

“Furthermore, being only its own subject matter, [the proposition]’s location is the proposition itself, which makes it possible to say paradoxically, the proposition in question “has no real location.” Daniel Buren

#23: Here is his thesis put succinctly: the goal of art is to get to the proposition. Art without location because it is, for lack of a better phrase, a math problem. Of course, this is impossible. The math problem read at noon is different from the one read a six p.m. Light on the page, etc.

“The rigidities of modern critical language and thought prevent a direct response to the eloquence of art when it is made by others…Mainstrean us the codification of ideas for the illumination of history and the teaching of the young.” Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer

#24: Perhaps the most articulate critique against mainstream narratives. Eloquence is a good word choice, loqua…

“Now that we are enraptured by geometry, geometric art has disappeared. There is no need for any more Mardens or Rymans to convince us of the essential beauty of the geometric field embodied in the television set’s glowing image. Today we have instead ‘figurative art’ to convince us that the old humanist body hasn’t disappeared (though it has). It is only now that geometric art has been discarded that it can begin to describe the deployment of the geometric.” Peter Halley

#25: I forgot how much this essay rocked my world. It’s Foucauldian in the sense that a totalizing force doesn’t need to flaunt its power. X-apply Dan Graham’s analysis on glass in architecture—“its architectural façade gives the impression of absolute openness.” The constant repetition of the figure convinces us that we are more than well-constituted boxes. What I like is that he’s lodging two critiques against two speakers—those in power and those confirming the power with complicit earnestness. There is a cynical undertone, of course. What seems adaptable to poetry is the question, does figurative poetry hide a deep human crisis that is going on right now? Is freedom (deeper than political freedom) under threat or a joke?

“Engels said that Aeschylus illustrated social struggles by means of discussing moral conflicts…” Renato Guttuso

#26: I’m adding this quote because I need constant reminder that conflicts really translate well on the page, even if they are buried deep in obscuration or analysis.

“We hear them speak of the danger in which modern man lives: the danger of losing his humanity and of becoming a thing amongst the things he produces.” Paul Tillich

#27: What does this mean in terms of communicating with objects? Installation? We certainly bear similarities to our objects d’ art: constituted and created and worn. Calling forth this identification is important, especially if it causes unease. At the same time, how can you explore this line of thinking without being a dualist? What is the difference between the body and the surrounding objects? What and how does one appeal to this humanity to which Tillich speaks?

“We know what squeezer Giacometti used to compress space: there is only one: distance. He puts distance within reach of your hand, he thrusts before your eyes a distant woman—and she remains distant, even when you touch her with your fingertips.” Jean-Paul Sartre

#28: Giacometti’s work is absolutely haunting and has the same desperation, franticness and analytical slimness of Arendt. There is little of looking at them without thinking about modern holocausts and nuclear winters and atomic social aftermaths. Human beings are fucking frail. Sartre really opens up the discussion, though, in looking at distance. We are all distant by circumstances. I find his sculptures better (indeed, more human) expressions of existentialism that Camus, Sartre or Kierkegaard’s work.

“In none of my sculptures since the war have I represented the eye precisely. I indicate the position of the eye. And I very often use a vertical line in place of the pupil. It’s the curve of the eyeball one sees. And it gives the impression of the gaze.” Alberto Giacometti

#29: X-apply Donne’s micro-marcocosmic eye (homology). Disassociate language from discourse.

“I think ideas are rather a weakened rung in the ladder of mental process: something like a landing where the mental processes become impoverished, like an outside crust caused by cooling… I aim rather to capture the thought at a point of its development prior to this landing of elaborated ideas.” Jean Dubuffet

#30: A great idea. I don’t particularly like his paintings, so I wonder how attractive theory and attractive art relate. Also, how viable is this idea of pre-thought? How could it be described with language, which by its very nature circumscribes and cuts off?

“Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash.” Willem de Kooning

#31: Brilliant applicability!!! How to create poems that flash their denotative meaning like a hidden flash in a film—so pornographic such literalness.

“I believe that art is recording. I think it’s reporting. And I think in abstract art, as there’s no report, there’s nothing other than the aesthetic of the painter and his few sensations. There’s never any tension in it.” Francis Bacon

#32: Tension conveyed in distortion. I best like Lucian Freud’s depiction of him. Again, conflict and tension being central to the action.

“I think most people enter a painting by the theory that has been formed about it and not by what it is. Fashion suggests you should be moved by certain things and should not by others. This is the reason that even successful artists—and especially successful artists, you may say—have no idea whatever whether their work’s any good or not, and will never know.” Francis Bacon

#33: Evocative of Duchamp’s role of the spectator, but I think it has a greater significance. As I think about systems of evaluation –critiquing people’s ability to let Abu Gharib slip from concern, while Swift Boat Veterans for Truth can occupy multiple weeks of attention—we must see how systems beget their own structures of evaluations. It’s easier. How do we respond to art, and others, with a kind-of tabla rassa and openness? This is critical for poetry and for human existence now; so much effort is being put into constructing the precursors to meaning making—the context or angle at which you want someone to experience a particular kind of content. The lobby, more than the art. The introduction more than the book…

“I always hope to be able to make a great number of figures without a narrative.” Francis Bacon

#34:I once wrote about the desire to compose figures unsuggestive of familiar human action. Like dance that is non-narrative but exploratory. Figures outside of a narrative—same thing? Are narrative habits and unnecessary? What is the relationship between narrative and context, when it comes to human forms and/or stories?

“As Delacroix said, ‘A painting or drawing is developed by first putting down something and then the superimposition of ever more definite statements.’ Romare Bearden

#35: I like the idea of layering. Say, for example, this could be adapted to poetry by inserting new lines of analysis way after the preceding lines were written. Would this create a layering effect?

“The late nineteenth century taught us that reality consists of constant change. As we move, the objects around us seem to change position; the world moves and things are constantly revealed in new aspects. Our visual experiences are usually cinematic sequences of not necessarily related views of details.” Philip Pearlstein

#36: This is the roving point of view that many surrealists tried to represent. What would a poem that attempted to represent this look like? In many ways, I think Stein did a decent job via reiteration: chair, chair chair my love: as if she were walking across the room toward Alice.

“What he actually sees is a fascinating kaleidoscope of forms; these forms, arranged in a particular position in space, constantly assume other dimensions, other contours, and reveal other surfaces with the breathing, twitching, muscular tensing and relaxation of the model, and with the slightest change in viewing position of the observer’s eyes. Each movement changes as well the way the form is revealed by light: the shadows, reflections and local colors are in constant flux. The relationship of the forms and colors of the figure to those of the background becomes mobile and tenuous. New sets of relationships constantly reveal themselves.”

#37: This is a continuation of Pearlstein’s thoughts about roving point of view, but a statement that reveals a quasi-social implication. Just as Josef Albers in The Colors in My Paintings eluded to a new way of seeing required my his color-relationships, Pearlstein seems to suggest that forms that accommodate or show parallax can usher in a more relative (visual) perspective. Such kindness, quiet, which probably effects, like, ten people.

“I don’t want handed down, traditional concepts to interfere with the content of my work.” Chuck Close.

#38: Here, again, we see an artist trying to get away from the categorization and language or art analysis. That kind of lexicon mediates a viewer’s experience of the piece. So NO HOMEWORK IN ART.

“If the surface information is consistent enough then the surface of the painting will disappear. Inconsistency draws attention to the surface itself and again interferes with the content of the work…The more important Abstract Expressionists never allow you to stop at the surface and look at the paint. Their painting marks always stacked up on some level to mean something else. Chuck Close.

#39: This makes me think of camping, a bend in the river beneath a waterfall, in Lisette’s new tent. Poorly snapped trees keeping us warm all night. This, again, is something Stella was trying to get at—the content, the concept above the details. I wonder how to reconcile this with the intuitive correctness of “showing the seams,” which is, for me, a Marxist point: show the labor so people don’t think these things are created miraculously.

“I am also more concerned with the process of transmitting information than in filling out a check list of the ingredients a portrait painting is suppose to contain. I too want to strip the viewer of the comfort of thinking that the traditional concepts of art he has been dragging around are automatically going to make him understand what art today is all about.” CC

#40: A vaguely hostile relationship, but interesting point of deliberate evasion. Where do the ideas that are ‘outside the tradition’ come from? Really, I think, it’s not a matter of where they come from but finding alternative valuations. The world is so full of everything, always, that it’s more a matter of attention and value than research and knowing.

“A painting shouldn’t depende on anything outside. It has to be a pure object and not have any kind of relationship to anything real—that would tend to take away from its purity and from the greatest achievement of all: being able to create something out of nothing.” Richard Estes

#41: The severance is what is notable: where and why a poem should not refer to anything: that it is an artifact, an original creation generated from some distinct act, not something in an ordinary stream of experience (had anyway).

“That’s the only possession an artist has—freedom to do whatever you can imagine.” Phillip Guston

#42: Not a formal point, but one about living as an artist amid rampant material desires.

“To feel and practice resistance is a prerequisite for the condition for an art that will last.” Jorg Immendorff

#43: I don’t particularly like his art—a little to limited in scope, explicitly political in a way that prompts walls more than openings. Nevertheless, a strong connection that I would like to add, on the flip side, to Chris’s statement about art practice transforming you as a citizen.

“Since the point of the images is to show all that which escapes conceptualization.” Magdalena Abakanowicz

#44: Why do we have art, as opposed to direct communication—to show the various inadequacies of our language and conceptualizations.

“When the Chinese have to say ‘chair’ they don’t say chair. The ideogram doesn’t depict a chair, but depicts a…I don’t know, maybe the bamboo. I mean, the bamboo in the morning is taken to become the chair somehow. What they look for is the situation of what they want to depict, and they find out a kind of analogical train of things which is going on, and they depict one of those things, and nobody really knows why they choose that one and not another one. So I do ideograms. The way I work is exactly like ideograms.” Francesco Clemente

#45: This is exactly what Standard was talking about when describing corollary logic—the attempt to access/effect the reader more (about a particular subject) by railing about/on a correlated scene. Chris’s red rectangle serves a similar purpose.

“[Rauschenberg] later explained that his pictures and combine paintings explored the ambiguous messages of ‘pre-formed, conventional, depersonalized, factual, exterior elements” drawn from everyday life, and that they ‘suggest the world rather than suggest the personality.’” Stiles on Rauschenberg

#46: As if I needed more reason to see Rauschenberg as a model. Here, people walk into a gallery expecting to be voyeuristically confronted with the exciting world of personality and, instead, have to confront the world in its detrital detail. How to do this with poems?

“The vehicle, or medium, need not transmit information (a message)—it can stand as a symbol for a message.” Richard Hamilton

#47: This is the band name phenomenon—the fact that the name, Arcade Fire, for instance, looks like it means something. As Johnny Walker said when thinking about his band’s name, ‘It can’t mean anything.’ So, these things look like they mean something. Locked boxes. Of what worth are they? They certainly get us excited—their impenetrability is arousing, but perhaps more like a commercial than a poem. It’s not that these statements have to be interpretable, in a conventional sense, but I like my lines to, at least, have the possiblity of meaning. Oftentimes, I go back and see, oh, that’s what I meant. Statements created for the sheer purposes of impenetrability are kind of jokes, in my estimation.

“Thus it becomes important to stress relations (as opposed to ‘free form’ where everything can be related to anything so that in principle nothing is related.)” Oyvind Fahlstrom

#48: Why the pejorative reaction to free form? Does anything can relate necessarily mean nothing is related? Or, in fact, does it mean everything is related? Relatable = related?

“All of these classifications are just restrictions—thus one tries to domesticate art, to make it available. And, in fact, art can only be available without restrictions of this kind.” Gerhard Richter.

#49: Again, citing Close and Abakanowicz’s instinct to evade categorization for the purposes of art. I believe someone later will say something to the effect of, the things that are acategorical are most interesting to me. The shooting between the systems of knowledge.

“Our eyes have developed such as to survive. It is merely a coincidence that we can see stars with them as well” Gerhard Richter

#50: A beautiful idea in its converse: we see according to survival, so there must be a reason we can see stars.

“The boundary of a body is neither a part of the enclosed body nor a part of the surrounding atmosphere.” Jasper Johns

#51: The permeability of ourselves, represented in the visual. Lines are gases.

“Publicly a work becomes not just intention, but the way it is used.” Jasper Johns

#52: The subsequent function of the art –say, if it is turned into a bridge—partially defines what it is. There is immense possibility in exploring how poems can be tactile, useful, etc. How not only presentation but use affects the content. Such glorious possibilities if this is done like Warhol’s silk screens: how different hues affect the same image.

“You have the audience at a disadvantage [in film]. They can’t see or hear anything else. You have them under your control. You make them look and live an experience, go through a process, which is enormously difficult to do in other forms of activities.” Bruce Conner

#53: A film, shown in a theater, can be an all-encompassing experience. There is a power relationship there—for better or worse. You can dictate a lot. I would love to make a film that calls attention to the people sitting in the audience—that dawning sensation that they are living, breathing entities in a dark room. Perhaps get them to imagine/see capillaries in chairs in motion.

“The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel,” and “the practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us.” Andy Warhol

#54: Warhol’s notion that meaning evaporates under repetition has chilling implications when we consider the post-Fordian world of mass consumption. It was this emptiness, a logical conclusion, that he sought to elucidate.

“Not an empty signifiers, but a perpetual ghost with a perpetual presence…” Barbara Kruger

#55: Compare this to the idea of signifying a message, rather than being a message. What is ghost language. What elements of, say, government or commercial rhetoric does the collective conscious forget but need to know, in order to write different histories.

“At a certain point, the work takes over, is in activity beyond the detailed control of the artist, reaches a power, grace, momentum transcendence…which the artist could not achieve except through random activity.” Gustav Metzger

#56: I was fascinated with this quote some months ago and used it as an epigraph for a poem. I am learning, more and more, how true it is. The random activity is essential for breaking out of patterns of thoughts and language. Vocabulary, for instance, can change in fresh ways as a result of random activity. When choice sabotages, or predetermines, an outcome and leaves the writer writing something he or she already knew. If we assume Warhol’s concern regarding homogenetization is a real concern, what can choice do to subvert decision-making models that are not our own?

“What interested me was to put into iron sculpture a new, continuous, and live force. The result was in no way a graphic representation of a force, but the force itself…” Takis

#57: This was part a larger shift from reference to referent. The latter is necessarily preferable, and is no more real. References exist as energy, just as physical objects.

“The restlessness of a line: it wants to be a plane. The restlessness of a plane: it wants to be space.” Heinz Mack

#58: Do representations want to be something else, as in, inherently? What about colors on the spectrum?

“The complete integration of color and motion, whose continuous effects overcome the sadness of finality.” Heinz Mack

#59: A great fucking idea. How to affect the senses in such a way as to create a joy that a single sense, in isolation, can experience. Is there some joy experiencable only by converging sense data, or creating cyclical movements between color and motion?

“Any substantial body of work in art is an evolution of a private (emotive, subjective) yet somehow shared and accessible epistemology, or way of knowing. The artist’s task, his stock in trade, is sustaining a coherent and dynamic equilibrium while creating an evolutionary variety of forms. Art is the sine qua non (necessary condition) for developing informational contexts, or realms of discourse, through which discontinuous and novel synthesis integrates the hertofore unlinked. By breaking in fresh psychological or psychic space the artist, therefore, informs survival, which requires a constant ‘supply of uncommitted potentiality for change, i.e. flexibility.’” Frank Gillette

#60: Artistic practice as representative of flexibility and ability for adaptation. We can make sense out of the new, via juxtapositions. This values the process, irrespective of what generative content is being made.

“Since art provides the incentive to experience the unfamiliar, any event/object/concept utilizing contemporary communications technology as its medium is a priori a declarative statement, heuristic in spirit.” Frank Gillette

#61: Compare this to Kosuth’s warning about contemporary mediums hiding ancient ideas. Gillette seems to be arguing the opposite: any use of new technologies is a statement in and of itself, as well as a means of posing old problems in new ways.

“Video systems materialize the potential link between the artist and the planetary exoskeleton of communications systems, television, holography, protean computer networks, satellites, etc. Inasmuch as video is the first full materialization of this linkage principle, it exemplifies the proposition that art is environmental.” Frank Gillette

#62: I’m not so sure that I fully believe computer networks, et. al constitute the primary social environment. I tend to believe that it’s some enabling parasite. Nevertheless, Gillette seems to be arguing that video offers a personal in-road to this network. Of course, now, 30 years later, blogging and other interfaces are present.

“…since art becomes a record of a process and not the manipulation of passive materials. Within this view, the artist’s subjective-emotional state, ie, his hybrid forms of introspection, and the technology which conveys them constitute parallel continuums.” Frank Gillette

#63: I think of Bruce Nausbaum’s performances in which we watch him learn, or at least think about, physics, his body, etc. The recording of the event –that leads to insight—rather than the material that the artist works with to gain insight. Think about objects and investiture. Ann would hate this (she believes that objects are instilled with an artist’s labor). How does conceptual art deal with this? Is there a Marxist-labor critique of conceptual art? I guess we have to acknowledge that thoughts are energy and parts of labor. But the reference to insight—what is that as a gift? A thought? The record, as opposed to the material…

“The imposition of values derived from a perception of continuity, as history, upon the high variety and discontinuity of day-to-day living results in a distortion of our expenditure of flexibility and capacity to adapt. A corollary effect of the increasing use of video systems is the alteration of our apprehension of both the historical record and daily existence. Since video is a medium of real time, i.e., it transmits the temporal quality of the process being recorded, it alters our experience of our own memory, of history, and of daily life.

“This alteration is always idiosyncratic to the artist’s attitude, or orientation, toward his center of gravity as he steers the camera. The body sense in relation to its environment through technology is the impacted perception which that complex of eye/technology/environment is itself recording. Thus video is primarily an ecological medium.” FG

#64: A lot here. The first part mentions how video, by its ability to record temporal qualities of events can alter the way we remember things. Imperfections, long pauses. It can be used to go against the mind’s process of distillation or augment it (with cuts). Furthermore, the fact that the lens is separate from the eye means that our body can direct our perception. We can know a store from the perspective of our right foot, for example. Hence, we can trace/represent our body’s relation to the world.

“The central obstruction to the full acceptance of the video network as an artistic medium in its own right is the fear that somehow or other prime objects will be devalued and traditional hierarchies, some of which have been accorded the status of guiding myth, will be replaced.” FG

#65: That art could go completely conceptual. That the material world, defined in a traditional way, no longer holds the same value it once did.

“The entire phenomenon began to resemble less the material objects depicted and more the process of the mind that was moving them.” Bill Viola

#66: How Platonist. Also, structural. Does the material world serve as a sheaf for various mental and emotional forms? That there is, for example, the embodiment of fear?

“The viewer sees only one image at a time in the case of film and, more extreme, only the decay trace of a single moving point of light in video. In either case, the whole does not exist (except in a dormant state coiled up in the can or tape box), and therefore can only reside in the mind of the person who has seen it, to be periodically revived through their memory. Conceptual and physical movement becomes equal, experience becomes a language, and an odd sort of concreteness emerges from the highly abstract, metaphysical nature of the medium.” Bill Viola

#67: This is another amazing idea: the dematerialization of the media. One can do conceptual art from jail. There is this process of reconstruction. The actual art piece is a linear stream located only in the head of the viewer—played and replayed—who puts it together. This is hugely attractive, to me, because it models such a dispersion, a wide expanse of effectiveness.

“The word contemplation is derived from the ancient practice of divination where a templum is marked off in the sky by the crook of an augur to observe the passage of crows through a square.” BV

#68: Ah, the source of the cats on leashes steady camera.

“’Feedback,’ using Norbert Wiener’s definition, is ‘a method of controlling a system by reinserting into it the results of its past performance,’ a learning process with the ability ‘to change the general method and pattern of performance.’ The present methods employed by QUBE limit feedback to the mere illusion of participation.” Peter D’Agostino

#69: I cited this, first, to remember Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle and how his characters seemed to learn about the systems they were dropped in—as if a person dropped into dreamscape. But, second, the last part of this quote, which deals with fake participation could never be so relevant. How can one simulate a system that in name invites participation but actually is working on its own?

“The cathartic nature of speech and revelation brings a balance, assurance and occasional wholeness to the duplicitous subcurrents of the text. This series is based on fact, on reality. However, close-up shots on video make even the most honest and despairing episodes hint at fictitiousness.” Lynn Hershman

#70: This is important to consider as I embark on the project of fusing video and poetry—how the visual medium will undermine the certainty of the text.

“Thus an art apparently hostile and antithetical to mass culture, preserving craft values and arguing against ‘labor consciousness,’ in fact depended on its technologies: a seeming paradox worth keeping in mind. The camera and print technologies were perceived as neutral, tool-like machines to be subsumed under the superior understadings or an aesthetic elite.” LH

#71: An amazing fucking idea. What is preserved is the reference to the importance of crafts—not the crafts themselves. No wonder people are self-conscious when they take craft classes. They have been bombarded with the photographic representations and not the real objects of labor. What a discord, or disappointment. Perhaps I should take a picture of a woven basket with a clip underneath it reading, “The importance of a woven basket.”

“Marcuse traces the use of ‘culture’ by dominant elites to divert people’s attention from collective struggles to change human life and toward individualized effort to cultivate the soul like a garden, with the reward being pie in the sky—by and by—or more contemporaneously, ‘personal growth.’ Succinctly put, Marcuse shows the idea of culture in the West to be the defusing of social activity and the enforcement of passive acceptance. In the Western tradition, form was identified as the means to actually affect an audience.” LH

#73: Again, I go back to Kosuth, who argues form is the only way to influence and change minds conceptually. Do you think Marcuse is talking about content in a traditional sense? What kind of art would he make? I buy the argument, almost wholesale, that Western culture is actually a system of pacification. More now than ever. The same fucking radio songs, symphonies, tv plots, theater pieces. I can almost say I never saw radical art –or art that prompted me to act, socially, in conscience—until I sought it out.

“Cage and company taught a quietist attention to the vernacular of everyday life, an attention to perception and sensibility that was inclusive rather than exclusive but that made a radical closure when it came to divining the causes of what entered the perceptual field.

“Clearly, though, McLuhanism, like other familiar theories, offered artists the chance to shine in the reflected glory of the prepotent media and cash in on their power over others through formalized mimetic aestheticization.”

“To recapitulate, these histories seem to rely on the encompassable (pseudo-) transgressions of the institutions of both television and the museum, formalist rearrangements of what are uncritically called the ‘capabilities’ of the medium, as though these were God-given, a technocratic scientism that replaces considerations of human use and social reception with highly abstracted discussions of time, space, cybernetic circuitry and physiology; that is, a vocabulary out of old-fashioned discredited formalist moderism.”

“Nothing could better suit the consciousness industry than to have artists playing about its edges embroidering its forms and quite literally developing new strategies for ads and graphics.”

The history of the avant-gardes and their failure to make in-roads into the power of either the art institutions or the advancing technologies through these means suggests that these efforts cannot succeed.”

#74:A weighty and swift critique. Artists, quite simply, have been appropriated. The avant-garde is a rehashing of old terms and helps the commodity-centric power structures.

“…each person has a very proprietary feeling toward his own image. What happens to his image happens to him. In fact, when one person’s image overlaps another’s, there is a psychological sensation akin to touch.” Myron W. Kruger

#75: How fun to manipulate images. Perhaps a way to bring folks together? A public work that incorporates your image and the last visitor. We almost never get to see ourselves juxtaposed. So maybe full body shots and, then, position next to someone else’s image.

“’Only through myth and the structures it requires can we combine the necessary paradox of definition and ambiguity, of order and uncertainty, of the tangible and the infinite.’ Levi Strauss.

#76: That myth is simultaneously ambiguous and specific. What does it mean for narrative sequences to not be connected with cause and effect but be running, perhaps, adjacently?

“Networking supports endless redescription and recontextualization such that no language or visual code is final and no reality is ultimate.” Roy Ascott

#77: In the context of an awesome endorsement of networks and, specifically, how they aid and compliment the user. Here is the reasons why: you get upset, rattled and have to create new meanings all the time. Infinite potential for interaction.

“Totally invisible to our everyday unaided perception, for example, is the underlying fluidity of matter, the indeterminate dance of electrons, the ‘snap, crackle and pop’ of quanta, the tunneling of transportations, nonlocal and superluminal, that the new physics presents. It is these patterns of events, these new exhilarating metaphors of existence—nonlinear, uncertain, layered, and discontinuous—that the computer can describe.” R.A.

#78:Our tools make us, just as we make them. Computers explain to us how the world works; I am likewise suspicious that we are projecting a computer’s functioning on the universe, just as clockmakers in the Renaissance saw nature as a cyclical clock turned by God’s hand.

“The telematic process, like the technology that embodies it, is the product of a profound human desire for transcendence: to be out of body, out of mind, beyond language. Virtual space and dataspace constitute the domain , previously provided by myth and religion, where imagination, desire, and will can reengage the forces of space, time and matter in the battle for a new reality.” R.A.

#79: Again, a bit hyperbolic and totalizing. Nevertheless the connection –technology and religion —of a disembodied state (as somehow longingly sought for) is interesting.

“The environment becomes equally as important as the object, if not more so, because the object breathes into the surrounding and also inhales the realities of the environment no matter in what space, close or wide apart, open air or indoor.” Frederick Kiesler

#80: Shifting the frame a bit wider—the environment defines an object, just as a context to a statement.

“There is a difference between actual cubic feet of space and the additional space that the imagination supplies. One is measure, the other an awareness of the void—of our existence in this passing world…”

“An empty space has no visual dimension or significance. Scale and meaning enter when some thoughtful object or line is introduced. This is why sculptures, or rather sculptural objects, create space.” Isamu Noguchi

#81: Fucking genius idea. Poles, for example, of the same size, stretched out linearly, create a sense of depth. This can then translate to the existential experience of passing through our lives.

“Size determines an object, but scale determines art. A crack in the wall if viewed in terms of scale, not size, could be called the Grand Canyon. A room could be made to take on the immensity of the solar system. Scale depends on one’s capacity to be conscious of the actualities of perception.” Robert Smithson

#82: I remember reading this quote and how it explained why I was so intrigued with those close-up shots of rust, peeling paint, etc. The textures, if you let yourself believe it, are huge. You can see yourself getting swallowed by a dent in your car.

“When the Little People get destroyed, people start to think. I’ve often sensed the feeling of loss about the brutalization of that fragile fantasy which is emblematic of the lives they themselves lead, that sense of ‘well, everytime you try to do something good or beautiful around here, it’s always destroyed.’ It awakens and politicizes that consciousness.” Charles Simonds

#83: Small acts that incite reactions. The smallness, the peering in close, facilitates this empathetic moment. Attention becomes delicate, disembodied from human scale. Our emotions remain attached to sight.

“The metaphor was that a promenade is a homeostatic mechanism, wherein a community confirms its well-being on a daily basis to each other: everybody sees each other walking. So it’s urban ecology. If you break up the homeostatic mechanism then you have an angry city. People can’t see each other. You break the community. When we invent a new promenade system, we invent a new homeostatic mechanism, by which people can see each other on a daily basis.” Helen Meyer Harrison and Newton Harrison

#84: Just as it is important for lovers to hear about their partners’ days, communities need to see signs of health. That is, the same people walking on multiple days, a confirmation that people live. In cars, etc., people can’t tell who’s who, so it could be completely consistent with the circumstances of plague, etc. How many times do people go to malls in order to see community? To see faces?

“Objectivity is gained by being once removed. As you plumb a space with vision, it is possible to ‘see yourself see.’ This seeing, this plumbing, imbues space with consciousness.” James Turrell

#85: This is instructive just as a means to create another level of meaning—make the viewer see him or herself viewing. Just put something into the piece, visual or poem, that refers to the actual moment of attention.

“The more unobtrusive the work, the more the object seemed to assert its integrity.” Kristine Stiles

#86: This reminds me of Oldenberg’s cardboard pieces. The simpler and more familiar the act, the more the actual object comes through as worthy of being explored.

“Barry Le Va emphasized the impossibility of perceiving the difference between indeterminant and determinant placement, the accident and the intention, by carefully distributing various materials in an installation and also randomly scattering them. In this way, he set up a tension between the perception of chaos and the perception of arrangement in sculptural situations that appear visually similar.” KS

#87: So, for example, the recent poem I wrote which includes a sonnet scattered among the details.

“Duality of experience is not direct enough.” Robert Morris

#88: Here it is hidden: He presumes a multiplicity of being, but defines it negatively and claims, with the word ‘direct,’ that it is the true way of connection. Lots of layering within the quote (even though I agree).

“Rectangular groupings of any number imply potential extension; they do not seem to imply incompletion, no matter how few their number or whether they are distributed as discrete units in space or placed in physical contact with each other.” Rober Morris

#89: Rectangular, not square. How few boxes could I get away with creating?

“Surfaces under tension are anthropomorphic: they are under the stresses of work much as the body is in standing. Objects which do not project tensions state most clearly their separateness from the human. They are more clearly objects.” Robert Morris

#90: I think of Justin’s stacked bricks piece, in which the tower is leaning just enough to imply imminent collapse. The body is not static, so any piece that needs to invite imagination and empathy should imply movement. But, again, there are stereotypical movements which cast the piece into a secondary level of attention. Using, say, Serra’s list of verbs, or even verbs that are infrequently used, can imply the human in the most vivid way possible.

“I think that if a work is substantial, in terms of its context, then it does not embellish, decorate, or point to specific buildings, nor does it add on to a syntax that already exists. I think that sculpture, if it has any potential at all, has the potential to create its own place and space, and to work in contradiction to the spaces and places where it is created in this sense.” Richard Serra

#91: Perhaps the best example of this would be Serra’s giant impeding wall. He made an art that had to be navigated around. No one could ignore it; hopefully, calling attention to the fact that most public sculpture can be overlooked. I once read a feminist critique of the work, in which the author connected this aesthetic with the masculine go-it-alone mindset. Compare this ideas, of contrdicting space, to the Kiesler’s idea that the environment is as important as the work.

“They wanted me to put flag poles on top of pylons. My retort to that was I couldn’t imagine putting a swastika, a flag or a symbol on top of a Brancusi or a Rodin.” RS

#92: Again, art requires a freedom that transcends the political. It is absurd to think about nation states when exploring the human. There is a level, a connection, deeper than the constitutions of time and space and circumstance. Right?

“Rene Dubos discusses the distortion of stimuli: we tend to symbolize stimuli and then react to the symbol rather than directly to the stimuli.” Bruce Nauman

#93: This is similar to the phenomenological notion that our perceptions are mediated and, hence, we respond the idea of our sensations, rather than our direct experience. I respond, for example, to the idea that I just burned the fuck out of my arm, on my woodstove door, way before I even feel the pain. The question is, what does this mean for art? If people are responding to art, as an idea, even before they see something, then how much are they really reacting to the work? This stands as a strong argument for why art should be acategorical, or not easily pegged into either art or a regular everyday experience. Hoax artists were trying to get this idea across. At the same time, there are strengths in perspectives. We have to 1) select the frame through which we want our viewers to experience our work 2) let them see that we are asking them to get into a particular headspace.

“What I’m trying to do now is to set up situations in which audiences have to use their minds to piece elements back together.” Barry Le Va

#94: This makes me think a lot about narrative as construction. Le Va offers signifiers –such as his piece with strewn paint and canvas on a floor, as if someone stripped an exhibit to shreds—that the viewer can then turn into an ordered story.

Fake Cities:
A Mindful Stroll Through America’s New Commercial Space

The Streets at South Point is a retail universe fit into a city set—a facsimile of urban blocks complete with manhole covers, street signs, lamps, pedestrian crossings and brightly colored awnings. Developers say they modeled it on Durham, the closest city, with the additions of corbelled warehouse walls, painted ads and tobacco curing smoke stack. But it would be an idealized copy, at best: the actual city’s downtown includes closed motels, defunct factories and plywood windows warped by rain.
Unlike Durham, this fake city is both populated and profitable. Shoppers pass by open store doors, feeling the rolling waves of air conditioning. And no one seems to care about this greater phenomenon in which historic models stand in for historic cities that are, themselves, disintegrating. This city thrives on its citizens’ television logic, their suspension of disbelief, their excitement in knowing that they will soon be entertained and their nostalgia for a community life they’ve never known.

Susan and I arrived ten minutes ago. She is a professor at Duke University, who I asked to accompany me to the mall to discuss its machinations.
We enter and sit beside a fountain in which bronze statutes of children appear to be playing. “This statute,” I say, “represents freedom for people while they shop. It’s calming effect counteracts the anxiety that all these ads produce.”
“It cools people down from the heightened anxiety of shopping,” Susan replies.
“Right,” I agree. “Developers try to overwhelm shoppers so they will purchase products to return themselves to a sense of stability. But developers don’t want shoppers to leave, so they place these fountains throughout the mall.”
“That’s interesting,” Susan replies. “I suppose the incidental plants are also a way of cooling the red zone of shopping.”
“And they’re exotic,” I say. “They make this place feel like a fantasy land.”
We sit silent for a second and look around. I spot a man in a striped polo shirt photographing store fronts and point him out to Susan.
“Must be undercover surveillance,” she jokes.
A man in a matching shirt walks by.
“He’s dressed like that guy,” I say. “I wonder if they’re part of something…”

Susan and I leave the table and follow the man. He’s in his late thirties, has moussed blonde hair and a muscular gait.
“Excuse me,” Susan asks. “Are you part of this place?”
“No,” he replies, “I am on vacation. My friends and I came from South Africa.”
His name, as we find out later, is Gerhardt Jooste.
“Are you moving to Durham?” Susan inquires.
“No. We are just on a tour.”
“It’s odd that you would come to Durham. We’re not in the center of any map.”
“We’re taking a tour of shopping centers. We’ve been now to 19. We went to Los Angeles, Palm Springs, San Diego, Atlanta and Raleigh-Durham. I’ll tell you, this is the best we’ve seen. We are quite surprised.”
Gerhardt looks toward his friend who has wandered off.
“Do you work in city planning?”
“No, we’ve got a property development company in South Africa.”
“You should go to downtown Durham. A lot of this mall was stylized on decorative aspects that they borrowed from there.”
“I must say, it is something other than your typical closed mall,” he says. “Look at the shop fronts and canopies!”
“Are you going to build malls like this when you get to South Africa?” I ask.
“We’ve been building malls,” he explains. “We’re doing smaller things about a third of this size called Value Malls. We noticed that we don’t really see the service oriented things, like food outlets, here. In South Africa, you’ll get a food retailer as an anchor in a shopping center.”
“Our older style malls always had a grocery store as one of the anchors,” Susan explains. “But more recently we don’t have them. Randall and I were theorizing that’s so shoppers are not faced with the grim reality of shopping to provide for their actual needs in the space where they’re supposed to be shopping for their fantasy life.”
“We were discussing this last night. What happens when people come to shop for fashion? They won’t go groceries? They make separate trips?”
“Those more ordinary needs are not going to be met in a mall like this. The service oriented, again, returns the person to the more daily life reality. A mall like this, even though it looks like a city street, is really meant to cue a more extravagant style of consumption.”
“But it’s all about convenience.”
“No, you’re still living with convenience.”
“We are looking for convenience. We are looking for a shopping experience.”
“No, this is a shopping experience. This is not convenience. Not a single daily life need would be met here.”
Gerhardt looks perplexed. “ But wouldn’t it be nice to have a shopping experience and an extension that is service oriented?”
“Yea, divided by a parking lot,” Susan replies.
We stroll toward the indoor mall’s entrance. Overhead, a mammoth slab of concrete serves to shield shoppers from rain; they pass into the front doors quickly.
“Don’t get into trouble,” I tell Gerhardt, reminding him that this city is private property. “The Visitor Courtesy Code says you can’t take photos inside.”
“I won’t,” he responds. “We’ve been thrown out about ten times. I think what we’ve seen outside is so nice.”

Susan and I walk inside. Map stands of rosewood veneer feature the engraved shapes of crop circles. We proceed into the central rotunda in which elevators crisscross the enormous space. People can be seen walking at every eye-level and in every direction. Sound projects and dies like noise around an indoor pool.
“We should stop by this store called Build-a-Bear,” I say.
“That’s where you make your teddy bear,” Susan asks.
I nod and we get on the escalator.
When we arrive at the store we notice a large mechanized bear wearing a thimble. It is rocking its head back and forth and appears to be captured in a cylindrical glass case. Beside it, a man is standing in a doorway. He has a buzz cut, khaki trousers, and name tag reading “Blair.” He is holding a teddy to his chest.
“How are you today,” he asks.
“Hi,” Susan and I reply in unison.
“Have you been to Build a Bear before?”
“Um, no,” we say.
“Well, we have a selection of about 30 different bears. They start at ten and go up to 25 dollars. You just pick them out of the bins. And basically you just circle around. We have a Hear Me section where you can check out little sound chips like this.”
Blair squeezes his bear. It emits a he-he-he laugh. He continues: “If you want, you can put one inside their paw. After that we have a Stuff Me section, where we actually stuff them. It’s really neat. You can stuff them, then go back to the corner where we have all kinds of clothes. Then there’s a letter on the computer. You fill that out and it prints a birth certificate. Finally, your animal goes home in a little cardboard box shaped like a house.”
“Wow,” I reply, astonished.
“Wowee,” Susan says. “We’re going to walk around and look at the process. This is amazing.”
The store is decorated like a kids version of a sewing shop. It is filled with oversized yellow, red and blue ratchets, gears and zippers. The company motto, “Where Best Friends Are Made,” wraps around the registers. I walk by the bins of teddy pelts and approach a line of shoppers. They are standing in front of the Stuff Me section.
A teenage boy watches Marianna, a Build a Bear employee, take his teddy and place it over a stainless steel cylinder resembling an exhaust pipe. White fluff shoots through a clear tube into the animal. Marianna wiggles the fur over the rim. The process makes the staccato sounds of a whip cream can. When she finishes, Marianna gestures toward the boy’s hand, which contains a red satin heart. “Rub the heart together,” she tells him. “Make a wish and give it a kiss.”
The boy brings it to his mouth, kisses it and hands it to Marianna. She places it inside the bear and passes it to another employee, Amanda, who sews up its back. I walk away and find Susan in the Dress Me section.
“Well, this is a popular store,” she says. “Now I see how they pay their rent. Look at these leathers. You can have your own little…”
“Bad ass bear,” I interrupt.
“Oh my gosh.”
“They go home in their own little house,” I say, pointing to the cardboard shacks the size of grocery bags.
“Well, I have lots I can say about that,” she says, starting toward the door.

Outside we pass through a stream of shoppers. Susan turns to me excitedly, “The idea of cross-species birthing, united with assembly line, and finished off with consumption-- buying the proper attire!”
I laugh. “What would Marx say about this?”
She thinks then nods. “Well, in Build a Bear, we’re purchasing the aura of production. Also the sense that making it is also birthing it is a mixing of genres. It’s fascinating that a child who will never work on an assembly line gets to experience what that might have been like. Yet, in fact, the stuff out of which the bear is built is probably made by real children in sweatshops somewhere.”

We leave Build a Bear and walk onto a bridgeway where three women are seated, quiet and staring, on a bench. We look over the safety rail at the lower level kiosks and stores. “When you stand here and look at the flow of people,” Susan says, “it’s almost as if each one of us in this environment becomes an item on an assembly line.”
I ask her to explain.
“Well, I’m still thinking about Build a Bear, where you really do participate in assembly line production. In there we are meant to produce, or at least assemble, a product. Here you are meant to assemble your consumption via all these images. I mean, look at this American Eagle.”
A poster hanging to our left depicts a woman crowd surfing. Her exposed belly is centrally framed while teems of shirtless boys hold her up.
“They devote a huge amount of window space to this large photo that sells the image of people having fun. If we looked at other photos, I think we would see they really are selling moods, experiences and qualities that are less tangible than clothes. It’s as if purchasing these clothes could make you have an array of feelings that you’re not now having.”
A Polynesian hut décor, to our right, frames large posters of teenagers in beach scenes. “It works with the mall,” I add. “If you want to get out of here, and you see a photo depicting freedom, you might purchase the product to substitute your leaving.”
Susan nods and we walk on. “Have you noticed that this mall is structured in a gradual bend,” I ask. “That it makes the shopper keep walking to find the end?”
“Yes. It’s an optical illusion.”
“And this whole arc is filled with bridges. It’s like we’re in a Mad Max and the Thunderdome living facility.”
Susan ponders then attempts an explanation: “In these enclosed malls, architecture connects with time. And it’s about forgetting it. Have you seen anything to remind you what time it is? This kind of architecture, which features a lot of bridgeway, reinforces the notion that you are in a state of suspension.”
“You know, the storefronts also confuse time and place,” I say. “Look how many types of historic architecture are represented. Doesn’t that look like a storefront from Florence?”
To our right, a shop features a canopied, old-world concrete façade. Charlestonian and Bauhaus styles, with hurricane dormers and rigid grids, adorn the adjacent stores.
Susan nods. “All connection to a real environment, all pretense of the down home, evaporates. Outside we might have had a Main Street—a kind of place that reminds us that once we shopped in an open air, urban environment. In here, these shops might have different logo labels at their entry ports, but the entire environment has imploded into a hyperspace of global merchandise.”
“What is hyperspace?”
“Well, where we are joined to the globalized network of production and consumption. Where we no longer have a demographic, or a sense of topography. Where we no longer have a here here. Where we could be anywhere.”

Susan and I walk toward an escalator and, beside it, a statute of a child with her hand outstretched toward the moving rails. She scares disembarking shoppers, who presumably turn to see only her grinning innocence. Riding down, Susan and I notice surveillance cameras hidden amid track lighting. We exit the escalator and walk into a yellow and white tile hallway connecting the mall to the bathrooms. At the end of the hallway, three windows look onto two men sitting at a curved desk. Above them a banner reads, The Office of Public Safety.
The men are looking at various screens. One depicts an officer talking to a disgruntled shopper in the parking lot. Another depicts people strolling through the mall. Three monitors show Susan and myself, from the back, looking through the window.
“Why would they have so many angled on the alleyway to the bathroom,” Susan wonders.
The man on the right rolls his chair in front of a screen, reaches for a joystick and pans the food court. He can magnify the image enough to see a single person chewing.
“Wow! He can pan. It’s a joystick. And zoom! Look at that!” I say.
“Right, I guess the place where people would mingle like a food court is where they really have people watching.”
After seeing an officer disappear behind an unmarked door, we leave the tile hallway. We walk outside, sit on a bench and face the mall.
“Well, the first thing I noticed is that down the alleyway to the shits is the security,” Susan says. “And all of a sudden another aspect of this place is revealed: There is a whole backside we’re not seeing. As in Disney World, you never see the work that keeps it going. You don’t see the cleaning. That’s all done at night, after the visitors have gone home. There’s this erasure of work. Yet it’s oddly manifested in the work of surveillance, which you’re allowed to see.”
“It’s intimidation,” I say. “The security confronts the inquiry of how this place works. The site for understanding your environment is tucked away like all the other sites of necessity—bathroom, food court, children’s area. Everything but consumptive fantasy has been put in the margins.”
Susan shifts in her seat and replies. “It’s like the South African said. He was basically asking, Where is real, daily life? Well, it’s in these corners and odd little manifestations like that. Otherwise, none of this is about real, daily life.”